be ignored. But some writers have magnified the different types of doctrine discernible in the sacred records so as to make them contradictory. The Pauline epistles are affirmed to teach doctrines irreconcilable with those of Peter and of John. Paul's theory of justification by faith is held to be directly controverted in the epistle of James. The Elohist documents of the Pentateuch are believed to contain a different doctrine of God from that which appears in the sections assigned to the Jehovist. We opine that the simplest, truest, and soundest system of Christian dogmatics may be constructed by avoiding the extremes of both these tendencies, appropriating what is really valuable in each, and showing that those doctrines which are most surely believed among us are preeminently biblical.

Milton S. Terry

ART. III.-ASSYRIA'S FIRST CONTACT WITH ISRAEL.

THE Semitic peoples have long been retreating before the resistless forward movement of the Indo-European peoples. They who once held the great world empires have to-day no world power of the first magnitude. The brilliant civilization of the Moors in Spain went down before the Indo-European Spaniard, just as the glory of Carthage was trampled in the dust beneath Rome's iron heel. The arms of the Semite are no longer a threat to the world's peace; his ideas only are potent for good or ill. Of his future no man may speak with certainty. His retreat may be continued till his personality is swallowed up and lost; or some mighty impulse may hurl him once more in conquering might upon the Indo-European.

Though his future is thus doubtful and his present thus weak, his past forms humanity's greatest romance. The Semite, who is he? His period of preparation for a world career was probably spent in Arabia. He is emphatically a man of the desert. Like the beautiful wild ass of the desert, "he scorned the tumult of the city" till his well-knit frame was ready for an herculean effort. But when the day came he swept out into Babylonia, conquered the land, and absorbed its civilization. From Babylonia was Assyria also possessed, and soon the cold mountain heights of Aram and the weltering hot Jordan valley were his. From southern Arabia he went into Egypt, and thence to the highlands of Ethiopia. Under changed conditions he took to the Mediterranean coasts of Africa; and soon fairest Andalusia was his also, and that to bless and not curse. Wherever he went he took culture along with the sword. The Levant is filled with his inscriptious, and the memory of the deeds he has wrought and the words he has spoken must continue while man endures. "Incontestably the best thoughts and principles-the most profound, the most propulsive, the most potential—that

* The question as to the original homeland of the Semites is still problematical. To the present writer Arabia is decidedly more probable than the other place suggested, namely, Central Asia. This is maintained by Sayce, Sprenger, Schrader, de Goeje, Wright, and many others, while Guidi and Hommel support the northern view. For clear statements of the argument for Arabia see Sayce, Assyrian Grammar, 1872, p. 13, and McCurdy, History, Prophecy, and the Monuments, New York, 1894, pp. 20-22. A résumé of all conflicting views is given in Wright, Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages, Cambridge, 1890, pp. 4, ff.

men have ever cherished have been conceived and elaborated in Semitic minds." In the domain of religious thought his supremacy is at this hour beyond all the dreams of his most imaginative poet. Mohammedanism, Judaism, and Christianity are all Semitic; and the Indo-European has profited them nothing, save when he gave his strength to their wider diffusion. And the Indo-European now has no higher calling than this very diffusion of Semitic ideas.

But to propagate any of these religions demands of the IndoEuropean the possession of a sound knowledge of that faith. When the Englishman sets out to tell to the Chinese the story of Jesus and of his plan of salvation he must know Christianity in no mere surface fashion. He must know its history, know its origin, know its precursor-Judaism. How shall a man teach what he does not know, and how shall he know Christianity if he knows not Judaism, and how shall he know Judaism if he does not know all the peoples who touched Judaism in its history? There is no knowledge that the individual may acquire that will be foreign to his study of Christianity, for all knowledge is touched by this living faith. But no knowledge is of so great value as the knowledge of history. The history of Christ is fundamental. But behind his history is the history of Judaism, and behind the history of Judaism is the history of the mighty Semitic race. Both directly, in war, and indirectly, by far-reaching influences, the people of Israel were affected by the Assyrians and Babylonians; and the man who would know Israel must know these peoples. It was from Babylonia that Abraham came into Palestine; it was into Babylonia that the Jews went into an exile from which only a few returned to build the second temple and found a Church. Between those two great events there were numerous points of contact between the peoples of the Mesopotamian valley and the people of the promised land. In almost all of them the Assyrians and Babylonians were the aggressors, seeking ever to blot Israel from the face of the earth and to establish Assyrian rule over her territory.

To know the story of the successive campaigns waged by the Assyrians against Israel is to have the key to unlock the meaning of much that has been obscure in some of Israel's greatest

*McCurdy, History, Prophecy, and the Monuments, p. 7.

prophets. These noble and wondrously taught men saw God's hand in the history of the Assyrians, and viewed them as a Godsent scourge to punish the rebellious and idolatrous people of Israel and Judah. No man has ever painted the Assyrians so vividly, so faithfully as Isaiah: "They shall come with speed swiftly none shall be weary nor stumble among them; none shall slumber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor the latchet of their shoes be broken: whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind: their roaring shall be like a lion, they shall roar like young lions: yea, they shall roar, and lay hold of the prey, and carry it away safe, and there shall be none to deliver" (Isa. v, 26-29, Rev. Ver.). Those words were based on accurate knowledge of the Assyrians, and find their full justification in the oft-repeated phrases in which Assyrian annalists describe the movements of their armies. For many a passage in Isaiah, in Amos, in Micah, in Nahum the best commentary is a line quoted from some contemporary Assyrian inscription. Not that the profound and life-giving ideas of the prophets are illustrated by the words of their neighbors, but rather that the conditions under which they lived and worked are made plain by the carefully kept records of Assyrian campaigns. But the historical writers of the Old Testament, as well as the prophets, are illustrated by the Assyrian inscriptions. Sometimes, the same event is told in the Old Testament and in the Assyrian annals, and when placed side by side the two narratives prove to be mutually complementary. To trace out all these parallels would require volumes. To set forth one of them, with all the materials for its perfect comprehension, is the object of this paper.

The advance of Assyria upon Israel was slow and methodical. The greatest masters of military occupation in the early Orient slowly acquired a sense of their own power and steadily but surely crushed out their opponents. At the end they became absolute masters of western Asia. It was natural that Israel should be among the latest of lands to be subdued, for peoples who were nearer to Nineveh must naturally be first overcome. Up to about the year B. C. 1500 Assyria was chiefly dependent upon Babylonia, from which it had been first occupied by Semites. From that time Assyria began to be a separate nation 14-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XI.

and her career of growth and aggrandizement began. About the year B. C. 1480 Asshur-bel-nishēshu ("Asshur is lord of his people "), King of Assyria, and Karaindash, King of Babylon, defined very accurately the border between their respective kingdoms; and for some time peace reigned between the two lands. In the very nature of things, however, Assyria and Babylonia must be rivals for supremacy in western Asia; and soon the struggle began. In the varying fortunes of the next few centuries Assyria was at times the leader, and at other times Babylonia held first place. During these early centuries the capital of Assyria was the ancient city of Asshur. When Assyrian power began to extend northward by conquest, and when Babylonian arins were ever beating against its southern border, Asshur was found to be too far from the geographical center and too near to Babylonian aggression. In the reign of Shalmaneser I (about B. C. 1300) Kalchi* became the residence of the Assyrian kings, and so remained until the reign of Sargon (B. C. 722–705), when Nineveh, its ancient and near-by neighbor, became the residence city of the kings. From B. C. 1300 to 1120 the conquests of Assyria were not of the first importance. The giant was consolidating his strength and preparing for the making of an empire.

But in the year B. C. 1120 the time had come, for in that year Tiglath-pileser I ascended the throne, and for five years carried on a series of campaigns against the North and West which not only produced enormous wealth from tribute, but added great sections of rich territory to the empire. He pushed the borders of Assyria to the edge of Lake Van in the north, and then pressed westward along that parallel until he reached the Mediterranean, north of the Phoenician States. Still farther to the west and north, even into Cappadocia, were the Assyrian borders extended, and other lands, not directly annexed, were forced to pay heavy tribute. His own summing up of the

*Biblical Calah (Gen. x, 11, 12). Kalchi was not the capital during this entire period, for Asshur-bel-kala (circa B. C. 1090) removed the capital to Nineveh, and Asshur-naçir-pal (835-860) returned it. See Winckler, Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens (1892), p. 145, and compare the articles by Schrader on Calach and Nineveh in Riehm, Handwörterbuch des bibl. Alt., 2te Auf. (1893). On Nineveh and all its surrounding cities it is now possible to refer to a thoroughly scientific paper written by an Assyriologist, in collaboration with a competent engineer who knows thoroughly the entire surrounding country. See Billerbeck and Jeremias, Der Untergang Nineveh's und die Weissagungsschrift des Nahum von Elkosch," in Beiträge zur Assyriologie und semitischen Sprachwissenschaft, band ifi, pp. 87-188, Leipzig, 1895.